Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is credited with discovering more elements on the periodic table than any other institution. In celebration of its 150th anniversary, we look at how far it’s come and where it’s headed.

William R. “Bill” Baker, who died May 4 at age 103, was a lifelong engineer with an unrelenting mind and boundless ingenuity. He was the first electrical engineer hired by Ernest Orlando Lawrence, the namesake of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Seventy-five years after one of the world’s first working cyclotrons was handed to the London Science Museum, it has returned to its birthplace in the Berkeley hills, where the man who invented it, Ernest O. Lawrence, helped launch the field of modern particle physics as well as the national laboratory that would bear his name, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

When Apollo 11 returned from its historic flight in 1969, the moon rocks and lunar soil collected by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin eventually found their way to some 150 laboratories worldwide. One of those was the Space Sciences Laboratory in Latimer Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. After experiments were conducted and papers published,